This console generation is winding down, which means gamers will soon be upgrading to new, more powerful consoles to play on. With these new consoles come some massive leaps in hardware, though it appears that one of those upgrades, at least as far as the PS5 is concerned, may be a bigger deal than many people realize, according to at least one game developer.
Tim Ash, a developer working on Lost Wing from BoxFrog Games, highlighted the importance of SSDs in a console and how it can not only help with performance, but immersion too. For Lost Wing, in particular, this is due to the fact that the game has a lot of respawning, and, therefore, load times. "Thankfully we’re very prompt on load times after the initial load", elaborated Ash, "but the advent of having high-performance SSDs on PS5 is a bigger deal for general performance and immersion than I think a lot of people realize."
Ash makes a good point, as how the quickened load times can affect an experience from a gameplay perspective is likely something not many people consider. Take the next-gen Spider-Man load time demo Sony released a few months ago, for instance. In that demo, Spider-Man simply blinks to the other side of the map during a fast travel sequence, with a brief screen transition in between. On current-gen hardware, Spider-Man loads in after a brief segment on the subway. While that subway sequence is entertaining, at least as far as load screens go, it's much more immersive to simply jump to the next spot and be immediately back in action.
Now, expand that out to a game like Skyrim, which also has plenty of loading screens, but ones that aren't nearly as entertaining. Being able to quickly load into new areas instead of waiting around every ten minutes while the rest of a dungeon loads should do wonders for keeping players engaged. Plus, with news that the PS5 CPU will make development times faster, there are plenty of reasons that fans should be excited about hardware upgrades.
Sony has already revealed the PS5 specs but has remained tight-lipped about what the console will actually wind up being. It seems likely that fans will get some answers at E3 2020 by the latest, but its still anyone's guess. Hopefully, the company will have more information for gamers soon.
Source: GamingBolt
